The Foreign Policy of the Calorie

In the first half of the twentieth century, the arithmetic of standards of living, revenues, education, and population gained significance in assessments of the relative status of states and empires. As doctrines of development first began to inform the practice of international relations, numerical indicators prepared the way, jumping linguistic boundaries and displacing local knowledge and native informants.

Historians and theorists of foreign relations often associate number with explanatory rigor: realist and revisionist historiographies grew to recognize quantifiable material factors as constituents of international reality exercising an exogenous influence on state behavior no matter what states seek, believe, or construct. Scholars have employed measuarability to distinguish between established analytic methods and cultural or "constructivist" approaches bidding for scholarly credibility. This so-called "hard data" comes laden with presuppositions that were cultural but not superficial.

In the early 20th century, food lost its subjective, cultural character and evolved into a material instrument of statecraft. To do so, it had to be quantifiable, but its numerical index also had to be furnished with a suitable context of goals, analogies, and claims. The calorie is not a neutral, obejective measure of the contents of a dinner plate: its purpose was to render food and eating habits of populations politically legible: a tool for facilitating a widening of the state's supervision of the welfare and conduct of whole populations that has been referred to in different contexts as state-builing, modernism, or regulating the social.

Americans are the first to concieve of a "food problem" amenable to scientific and political intervention and to use food as an instrument of power. Aside from abetting efficiency seekers, the calorie could be used to make precise comparisons between the diets of different classes and nations: assumptions that food was uniform and comparable between nations and time periods and that the state had the obligation to meet the dietary needs of a nation also emerged.

Numerical expression fostered an altered worldview both more definite about solutions to complex problems and more attuned to indicators of rising and falling fortunes, especially among nations: moral and legal arguments began losing authority.

A peculiarly American phenoemana in pushing for industrial efficiency spilled into Europe during WWI. Herbert Hoover and other nutritonists believed peace in the world could be maintained only through preventing scarcity. Hunger and employment will be cured not through law or legal processees, nationalism or Bolshevism, but in progress through raised standards of living. Securtiy rests on the ability to dominate the strategic terrain of global consumption.

Even as stats became standardized, their polticial uses grew more varied as empires, indepedence movements, and modernizing states and agencies validated their distinct heirarchies and ambitions through a numerical medium.

Colonial malnutrition occured when investigations suggested an improved diet might enhance labor efficiency and buying power in rural colonial populations. Formerly tolerable rates of disease and mortality became a heavy drag on prosperity: raising the standard of living necessary and demanded that the British manage markets, irrigation, property rights, social services, and consumption in the name of public welfare.